Treasured objects in school-aged children

Infants and young children often form tenacious, persistent attachments to soft objects. No investigation has focused, specifically, on an older school-aged population. Data were collected from parents of 171 normal children between 9 and 13 years of age from the middle to upper socioeconomic class. The study (1) compared current behavioral characteristics of children with or without a history of attachment; (2) compared the current behavioral characteristics of the children who have not maintained that attachment; (3) explored the relationship between parental attitudes and the persistence or disappearance of the object; and (4) explored family demographics and object use among siblings. Approximately half (54%) had formed an attachment to an object in infancy. Of the group of 'users' approximately half kept it until age 9 years (49%). There were no significant behavioral differences among those children who were or were not attached to an object, or among those children who continued to use a soft object after age 9 years compared to those who never used one at all. Parents felt they had little to do, directly, with their child's relinquishing the object. Sibling use, the number of siblings, ordinal rank of the child, parents' marital status, sex of the child, and history of thumb-sucking were all unrelated to object attachment.